Preface -- Introduction -- The new conservation. Giant power, rural electrification, and regional thought ; The farm crisis and the land utilization movement ; Herbert Hoover and rural conservation policy, 1928--1932 ; FDR: governor and candidate -- Poor people, poor land. The Tennessee Valley Authority ; Beyond the TVA: land utilization and rural rehabilitation ; Buried in dirt: the resettlement idea and the future of the Great Plains ; Rural electrification, soil conservation, water control, and farm security -- "The best new dealer from Texas". The Hill Country setting ; Historical development of the Colorado River ; Congressman Johnson ; LCRA expansion: rural electrification, recreation, and wartime growth -- The industrial transition. The resurrected AAA and the BAE's county planning experiment ; World War II and the decline of agrarian policy ; Jobs for all: industrial expansion and wartime resource policy --Conclusion -- Epilogue: Exporting the New Deal. Wartime assistance, postwar institution building, and the Cold War ; The Point Four Program ;The new conservation abroad.
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"This book combines political with environmental history to present conservation policy as a critical arm of New Deal reform, one that embodied the promises and limits of midcentury American liberalism. It interprets the natural resource programs of the 1930s and 1940s as a set of federal strategies aimed at rehabilitating the economies of agricultural areas. The New Dealers believed that the country as a whole would remain mired in depression as long as its farmers remained poorer than its urban residents, and these politicians and policymakers set out to rebuild rural life and raise rural incomes with measures tied directly to conservation objectives - land retirement, soil restoration, flood control, and affordable electricity for homes and industries.
In building new constituencies for the environmental initiatives, resource administrators and their liberal allies established the political justification for an enlarged federal government and created the institutions that shaped the contemporary rural landscape."--Jacket.
0511271379
ACLS Humanities E-Book.
New Deal
University of South Alabama
Conservation of natural resources-- United States-- History-- 20th century.
New Deal, 1933-1939.
Conservation of natural resources-- United States-- History-- 20th century.